Spaces: The green challenge

Published 2:43 pm, Friday, September 24, 2010

A trio of framed photographs by photographer Rick Hunter hang above the bed in the master bedroom, which is painted in a color that Byington calls charred olive.

A trio of framed photographs by photographer Rick Hunter hang above the bed in the master bedroom, which is painted in a color that Byington calls charred olive.

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A trio of framed photographs by photographer Rick Hunter hang above the bed in the master bedroom, which is painted in a color that Byington calls charred olive.

A trio of framed photographs by photographer Rick Hunter hang above the bed in the master bedroom, which is painted in a color that Byington calls charred olive.

Spaces: The green challenge

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Rustic doors open to a courtyard and water gently cascades through a fountain, welcoming visitors to the hacienda that Gary Joeris built in Hill Country Village. The hacienda compound was completed this summer, after a year and a half of construction.

Joeris, a commercial construction company owner, scrapped initial plans for a contemporary house on the 4 and 1/2-acre property when he became enamored with friends’ Spanish-style homes. He hired architect Malcolm Chesney and they worked for more than a year on the design of the main house, a separate hunting trophy room and the pool pavilion.

Already using many components of “green” construction, Joeris decided to add several more to earn the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver certification. It’s one of four levels of green building certification attained through a point system based on design and construction practices.

Using reclaimed materials — barrel tiles on the roof, wood for the doors and some floors and hand-hewn barn beams at the ceilings — earned LEED points. So did using Saltillo tile from Saltillo, Mexico, since it’s less than 500 miles from the building site.

Additional points came from minimizing the removal of trees as well as using the trees that had to be cut down. Mesquite from the property became the mantle in the trophy room and two bar tops in the house.

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Interior designer Lisa Byington, charged with creating a comfortable and inviting environment, selected paint colors beyond traditional hacienda hues of blue, orange and green. She picked chamois for the living and dining rooms, walnut in the kitchen, cognac for the library and charred olive in the master bedroom.

Squares of end-cut mesquite (her signature feature) top the large island in the kitchen. Hand-painted tile from Mexico makes up the backsplash above concrete countertops by Ron Mills.

Byington helped arrange Joeris’ art collection, mostly paintings by local artists. Two works by his favorite painter, Steven DaLuz, are on opposite walls of the entry.

More paintings are displayed in the gallery hallway, spanning the length of the public areas of the house.

Intricately carved doors displayed at one end of the gallery came from San Miguel de Allende. Joeris found them in the basement of a bed-and-breakfast in which he stayed. “Parts of the bottom were all termite eaten. We had to have them rebuilt,” he says.

In the living room, a mission painting by Franco Mondini-Ruiz occupies the mantle of the travertine fireplace.

The focal point of the dining room is the stunning boveda ceiling, a kind curved brick ceiling. “It’s very traditional in Mexico and these are with real bricks,” Byington points out. A large round two-tiered metal chandelier hangs above the round dining table.

After three years devoted to designing, building and furnishing the house, Joeris, a veteran of commercial construction, acknowledges that his foray into residential construction has been fun and he loves the results, but the process was, at times, challenging.

“See all this gray hair,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t have any gray hair before I started.”